Oh, I see. So at the private equity that the role you were coming out of, you felt like you really were captain of that ship or at least had a lot of, a lot of agency.
Acquiring Minds
From Software to Concrete Cutting (and $1.4m of SDE)
Excerpts · 392 segments · ~1:38:00 long
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Yeah, yeah, yep. I was general manager. I had the CEO and chairman of the board ahead of me. But, but I was given a lot of leeway there to make decisions and, and drive where I want it to. Right, right.
Okay, well, so ETA comes across your radar, your friends introduce you to it, give you buy, then build the book, which everyone listening will be familiar with. It probably speaks for itself why buying a business was the antidote to what ailed you. But is there anything more, is there anything more to say, anything less obvious about why, why this path?
I think it was just, I mean, it was really a parting of the clouds for me, reading the book, having it be a step by step program to follow or recipe to get to where I wanted to be. You know, I've been entrepreneurial my whole life. My wife and I owned, while I worked full time, my wife and I owned 30 apartment units at one point.
Right. We were doing things on the side. But a lot of that is just unscripted. Right. This was having a script to say, well, if you wanted to go about buying a business, this is the way that you would do it.
And here's the steps involved. Follow these. Right. And I was just following them, seeing where that would lead. And I think I was very fortunate in, in the direction it went in.
I have friends that have been looking for five years. Right. I really, once I got serious and started looking, it took me about eight months, nine months to find a business and buy.
Well, that's an important distinction between you and your friends and, and one we're going to explore. Okay, great. So what did your criteria look like for, for the business that you, that you sought? And start with geography.
You're.
We, I think you, we heard you say, are you in St. Paul or am I? Am I? Have you said that yet?
I know he's to St. Paul. Yep. So it was geographically centered. I didn't want to uproot and move anywhere. So the Twin Cities market is a pretty big market.
I was looking for a business to business service. And initially what I had scoped out or what I was looking for, I was very broad. I wanted to open the aperture, look at any type of service business.
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